Thecus N5500 5 Bay NAS Server Review

Looking Inside the N5500

The N5500 has 5 hard drive trays that are setup for 3.5” hard drives. The tray bottoms and front are vented for allowing air flow.

By undoing 3 thumbscrews on the back of the unit, the top slides off. On the left side of the N5500 is the motherboard. It’s sporting a 1.86GHz Celeron M processor.

It also has two 200pin SO-DIMM slots, with one stick of 1GB DDR2 installed.

The Dual DOM units are whopping 128mb each, but this is enough to hold the OS.

The back of the unit holds the rear 120mm exhaust fan with a standard 3pin connector. This is easily gotten to so if it happens to fail it can be replaced. This fan is not the quietest fan I have used. It’s not something you will want in your HTPC area. The N5500 was made with enterprise setups in mind where noise is typically not an issue.

The back of the drive cage is the hard drive back plane.

Pulling it out slightly we can see that the power supply connects to the back plane, and the back plane feeds power to the motherboard and the fan.